One thing that helps in bash is shell functions, because in bash aliases don't take command line arguments (unless my copy of Unix Power Tools is wrong).
Here's a couple examples of shell functions. I use these to put and get files to/from my notebook from my desktop (put these in.bashrc):
Here's what to me seemed like a key excerpt that makes his point that so-called "trusted" computing is something we should be extremely wary of. It's worth reading this one longish excerpt, if you don't have time to read the entire article, to get an idea of the danger:
(begin excerpt)...these document registries [...] will, collectively, know when any page is published or an existing page is modified, and can provide this information to operators of search engines, as will be discussed in the next section. Since the registries compute a document's signature by examining it and all embedded content, they might, for example, compare those signatures with those of existing documents (aggregated from all document registries) and check for matches against documents flagged as copyright protected. A match might alert the copyright holder of a potential violation by your page. The document registry might, in the interest of compiling a comprehensive archive of the Web or, perhaps, encouraged by a government mandate, make an archival copy of all documents for which it granted certificates; imagine how useful such an archive could be in resolving subsequent disputes regarding their content. Why, the document registry could even, in the interest of wholesomeness or, perhaps, inspired by a public law, examine the contents of the document and match it against profiles of prohibited content, flagging it for possible scrutiny by those who occupy themselves with such matters.
Since a document cannot be transmitted across the Internet without a certificate validated by its document registry, nor can a user who has received a copy of such a document access it once its certificate has been revoked (except on a machine which is never again connected to the Internet after receiving the document), should the document be found to infringe the rights of another party or violate the law in some manner, after this is established through due process of law, the document registry may be ordered to revoke the document's certificate, un-publishing it.
Some might even fantasise that document registries could, based on signature comparison and heuristic examination of document contents, even refuse to grant a certificate for a suspicious document unless the publisher provided proof it did not violate copyright or laws regarding its content. But that would constitute prior restraint on publication, which is unthinkable in a free society.
This, then, is the digital imprimatur; the right to publish as, in olden times, was granted by church or state. A document's certificate, its imprimatur, identifies the person (individual or legal entity) responsible for its publication, provides a signature which permits verifying its contents have not been corrupted or subsequently modified, and identifies the document registry which granted the imprimatur and which, on demand, will validate it and confirm that it has not been revoked.
>How do you store these things so that your 2-year old doesn't break them?
Easy. 7-Foot tall cabinet with doors. TV inside about half way up, strapped in with earthquake straps (this is in CalEEForneeeea). Then the video and DVD stuff is above, not below, the TV. This at least extends the window out a few more years, when she'll be able to drag grownup size chairs around.
And you get this error which leads me to think this the site is not "all" running on Linux:
The page cannot be found The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.
Please try the following:
* If you typed the page address in the Address bar, make sure that it is spelled correctly.
* Open the biology.plosjms.org home page, and then look for links to the information you want.
* Click the Back button to try another link.
HTTP 404 - File not found Internet Information Services
Technical Information (for support personnel)
* More information:
Microsoft Support
==============
BTW I'm using Mozilla Firebird, so I know this error message is coming from the server, and not being rewritten by my browser as IE tends to do.
Running on Linux, are you sure? Last night I did a 404 test on it, and it came back with an IIS error message. Maybe that's why it seems to have come to its knees so easily today?
>But I don't think they're liable to stop selling CDs anytime soon. This patch doesn't strike me as a big deal.
"Lulled by a period of stability which had seemed permanent they find it nearly impossible to take at face value the assertion of the revolutionary power that it means to smash the existing framework." -Henry Kissinger
>Maybe that's why my bandwidth provider won't identify the other end of the link
It's not hard to identify the other end of the link. One of the things these worms, or at least one of them (Welchi) does is access the root document of your httpd server if you have one running. So you get lots of hits to http://www.yourdomain/, aka index.html, coming from various IP addresses. The most obvious way these hits are distinguished from normal browser accesses is they don't load images or stylesheets.
So if you already have a web server, look in those logs. Otherwise, install Apache and run it for a few days to get a sampling of the logs, which will show you where some of the infected hosts are. However, this is only useful as a sample, because at least in my case so far I haven't seen much repetition of originating IPs. I do not believe the originating IPs are spoofed, btw, they are just Windows machines that have been infected.
I've been asking around about this, and it's amazing how many people are just brushing it off as nothing. It is a serious issue for IP addresses that are being hit.
Here are some more posts on the topic, elsewhere. Note how some people just say "Oh, you are getting hits! Hits are good, no?".
The blocking rules people suggest (see page five of the first link) don't work at my site, for some reason. Maybe it's because I only have access to.htaccess, not my own httpd.conf.
My favorite is when they wear nice gloves, at the dentist for example, and are continually opening this or that drawer with their gloves. I suppose they think the germs from my mouth aren't going to get onto the drawer, because they have gloves on??!! Of course they wipe all surfaces down with antiseptic, even every nook and cranny behind those drawer pull knobs, between every patient. Right.
Then there was the dental assistant who used her own five-second rule (oops, wrong story) to quickly pick up and start to re-use a tool she had dropped on the floor.
Apply the same mentality to a cell phone, which has much greater mobility in and out of the environment, and it does make an effective germ vector.
Just in case the site gets slashdotted, here's a cut-n-paste of the home page. Whew, glad I was able to get in to get this:
Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, mmessier@secureprogramming.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache/1.3.28 Server at www.secureprogramming.com Port 80
What if someone bought the LP, then bought the tape, then bought the CD? They have now paid three times for the same music. Are we buying a license to listen to the music, or not? I've always thought that this situation was somewhat ridiculous and that one should only have to pay once, especially with the prices of CDs as high as they are.
The industry will keep jiggering the protection schemes until it finds something that consumers will accept. My point is, this is technologically achievable. O'Reilly doesn't seem to think so, and holds out the 80's as an example. But the 80's are not an adequate characterization of what is happening today and in the future: networked, secure, and in many cases closed systems that can get fixes via over-the-air updates.
Case in point: my cell phone. Recently an over-the-air update removed several applications from the phone. This same technique can be used to update security mechanisms, even if they are cracked.
The cell carriers make plenty of money selling ring tones. Nobody has cracked the format for ring tones on my cell phone yet. The same model will work for music and other content once devices are more secure.
DRM would never work on today's PCs, though. I think there are many people (in the entertainment industry, for example) who think the PC was a regrettable mistake that should now be fixed by replacing it with a more controlled, less user-programmable, platform. They might not be able to do that at this point, but they will try with other devices. PCs will not go away, but other devices will become more and more central to people's lives. If DRM can be made to succeed on those devices, it will be viable.
>Joe Clueless Consumer does not have to be a crypto expert, just a Web amateur capable o downloading the "codec"
To do that, Joe must have a machine that allows downloading and installation of the codec. Too bad for Joe, his machine will probably have mechanisms to prevent and even retroactively fix security problems.
Close the system, and the game is over. You don't have to close all the systems, just the ones available to consumers. So, there emerges "trusted" computing (that can be trusted by content providers, not by the owner of the device). Don't assume the computer you can buy today is the computer being envisioned for tomorrow.
The need for backwards compatibility (raised by someone else) is a good point, but it goes away if you change the platform, for example from a PC to a generic entertainment or educational device. Think "device", not "PC".
He thinks the experience of software protection in the 1980's shows DRM will fail.
Not so. In the 80's, software publishers were attempting to do DRM on open systems. Not open in the sense of open source, but open in the sense of being hackable.
The work underway now is to make systems closed, so that DRM *will* be technically doable. It doesn't have to resist every attach Bruce Schnier can conceive of. It just has to be good enough to keep consumer behavior in check.
If DRM fails, it will be because of consumer rejection, not for technical reasons.
Create an account, log in, write a proposal, submit it, then wait.
Yes they have Usenet data, not just web data.
After I submitted a proposal this way, I had to bug them by email and eventually phone even to get the account set up. It's not that they aren't helpful, they are just busy with lots of projects.
But don't expect hand holding. You need to be comfortable operating in a Unix environment. And I don't know if the data can leave their servers; you might need to do all your processing using their machines.
By the way, in my previous reply to your post, yes I did see the humor, but there is also an underlying issue for which I wanted to give a serious reply.
You are asking, is it such a bad thing that AOL users are prevented from using a site?
In a word, yes.
The Internet reaches its highest potential when all users, even those that others might consider somehow lower caste, are able freely to read and contribute.
In some places, only AOL provides reasonable access to the net. And some people have to live with that. And some of those people, someday, maybe even today, will have great contributions. But perhaps even greater is the gestalt of full participation, and the value that provides to the entire Internet.
Problem is, the people who can afford the device and the service, are already old enough to feel stupid playing a video game on a tiny screen out in the open somewhere.
Don't know if this advice applies to this guy or not, because he might truly have a need to run at exactly midnight. But please, run your cron jobs at randomly chosen times, instead of exactly on the hour. That way we can spread the load (machine and network) better. Thank you, have a nice day.
I think you should find out whether this assistant actually has a clue what a weblog is, and report back to us. Does he/she imagine that there are people who actually will want to listen to this stuff? Or is there another agenda -- maybe the assistant wants to take voice notes for the purpose of later writing a book? If that is the case, just use a private voicemail box with a large storage allocation.
Another way would be an audio recorder (Archos) or even a small tape recorder, a line in jack on a sound card, and a few perl scripts to upload the newest recordings to a web site. Almost any geek should be able to slap this together.
An audio blog does have the cool factor of being a new thing, but the problem is listening to audio is so linear, it consumes human time to a much greater degree than text. There are no shortcuts with audio (short of tricks that are unlikely to materialize just yet in your particular weblog). I would have the same problem with a video weblog.
Do you have any attorneys in the Department focusing on user rights, as opposed to property owner rights? (When I think about IPR issues, I think not only of ownership Rights, but also of the Right of Fair Use.)
In other words, will the DOJ step in to enforce the Right of Fair Use if it is being infringed? If this seems too hypothetical, has there every been any such enforcement, and if not, why not?
1) In zero-g, will lubricants (minimal as they are) be more prone to leak out?
2) In zero-g, will friction be slightly lower, and will this cause any problems? Does modulation of RPMs depend in any way on any component of friction that is influenced by gravity? How about head movement?
3) Is head movement and position affected by gravity? I'm guessing not, but then, I'm just joe random slashdotter.
4) Will vibration issues be introduced by the removal of the (possibly dampening) force of gravity? Note I am not talking about external vibrations here, I'm talking about vibrations of the hard drive itself.
Let's see, you have been entrusted with finding RAID storage that is going to be floating around in space, or perhaps mounted in diving or falling airborne devices, and you are unfamiliar (scary in itself) with what's out there, and with this kind of risky work you are reaching out for help from... Slashdot?
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that helps in bash is shell functions, because in bash aliases don't take command line arguments (unless my copy of Unix Power Tools is wrong).
.bashrc):
.; }
Here's a couple examples of shell functions. I use these to put and get files to/from my notebook from my desktop (put these in
nb-put () { scp $1 me@192.168.0.9:/home/me/$2; }
nb-get () { scp me@192.168.0.9:/home/me/$1
So then to get a file I just do nb-get <filename>
Another thing that is nice to know is how to do for loops from the command line in bash. Not that it's hard, it's just different from tcsh:
for n in 1 2 3; do echo $n; done
Here's what to me seemed like a key excerpt that makes his point that so-called "trusted" computing is something we should be extremely wary of. It's worth reading this one longish excerpt, if you don't have time to read the entire article, to get an idea of the danger:
...these document registries [...] will, collectively, know when any page is published or an existing page is modified, and can provide this information to operators of search engines, as will be discussed in the next section. Since the registries compute a document's signature by examining it and all embedded content, they might, for example, compare those signatures with those of existing documents (aggregated from all document registries) and check for matches against documents flagged as copyright protected. A match might alert the copyright holder of a potential violation by your page. The document registry might, in the interest of compiling a comprehensive archive of the Web or, perhaps, encouraged by a government mandate, make an archival copy of all documents for which it granted certificates; imagine how useful such an archive could be in resolving subsequent disputes regarding their content. Why, the document registry could even, in the interest of wholesomeness or, perhaps, inspired by a public law, examine the contents of the document and match it against profiles of prohibited content, flagging it for possible scrutiny by those who occupy themselves with such matters.
(begin excerpt)
Since a document cannot be transmitted across the Internet without a certificate validated by its document registry, nor can a user who has received a copy of such a document access it once its certificate has been revoked (except on a machine which is never again connected to the Internet after receiving the document), should the document be found to infringe the rights of another party or violate the law in some manner, after this is established through due process of law, the document registry may be ordered to revoke the document's certificate, un-publishing it.
Some might even fantasise that document registries could, based on signature comparison and heuristic examination of document contents, even refuse to grant a certificate for a suspicious document unless the publisher provided proof it did not violate copyright or laws regarding its content. But that would constitute prior restraint on publication, which is unthinkable in a free society.
This, then, is the digital imprimatur; the right to publish as, in olden times, was granted by church or state. A document's certificate, its imprimatur, identifies the person (individual or legal entity) responsible for its publication, provides a signature which permits verifying its contents have not been corrupted or subsequently modified, and identifies the document registry which granted the imprimatur and which, on demand, will validate it and confirm that it has not been revoked.
(end excerpt)
>How do you store these things so that your 2-year old doesn't break them?
Easy. 7-Foot tall cabinet with doors. TV inside about half way up, strapped in with earthquake straps (this is in CalEEForneeeea). Then the video and DVD stuff is above, not below, the TV. This at least extends the window out a few more years, when she'll be able to drag grownup size chairs around.
Try this link:
http://biology.plosjms.org/nosuchfile
And you get this error which leads me to think this the site is not "all" running on Linux:
The page cannot be found
The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.
Please try the following:
* If you typed the page address in the Address bar, make sure that it is spelled correctly.
* Open the biology.plosjms.org home page, and then look for links to the information you want.
* Click the Back button to try another link.
HTTP 404 - File not found
Internet Information Services
Technical Information (for support personnel)
* More information:
Microsoft Support
==============
BTW I'm using Mozilla Firebird, so I know this error message is coming from the server, and not being rewritten by my browser as IE tends to do.
>"Oh, and it's all running on Linux ;)"
Running on Linux, are you sure? Last night I did a 404 test on it, and it came back with an IIS error message. Maybe that's why it seems to have come to its knees so easily today?
>But I don't think they're liable to stop selling CDs anytime soon. This patch doesn't strike me as a big deal.
"Lulled by a period of stability which had seemed permanent they find it nearly impossible to take at face value the assertion of the revolutionary power that it means to smash the existing framework." -Henry Kissinger
>Maybe that's why my bandwidth provider won't identify the other end of the link
It's not hard to identify the other end of the link. One of the things these worms, or at least one of them (Welchi) does is access the root document of your httpd server if you have one running. So you get lots of hits to http://www.yourdomain/, aka index.html, coming from various IP addresses. The most obvious way these hits are distinguished from normal browser accesses is they don't load images or stylesheets.
So if you already have a web server, look in those logs. Otherwise, install Apache and run it for a few days to get a sampling of the logs, which will show you where some of the infected hosts are. However, this is only useful as a sample, because at least in my case so far I haven't seen much repetition of originating IPs. I do not believe the originating IPs are spoofed, btw, they are just Windows machines that have been infected.
I've been asking around about this, and it's amazing how many people are just brushing it off as nothing. It is a serious issue for IP addresses that are being hit.
m l
i ty/2003-08/0002.html
.htaccess, not my own httpd.conf.
Here are some more posts on the topic, elsewhere. Note how some people just say "Oh, you are getting hits! Hits are good, no?".
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum39/1435.htm
http://lists.jammed.com/incidents/2003/08/0369.ht
http://www.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/linuxsecur
The blocking rules people suggest (see page five of the first link) don't work at my site, for some reason. Maybe it's because I only have access to
My favorite is when they wear nice gloves, at the dentist for example, and are continually opening this or that drawer with their gloves. I suppose they think the germs from my mouth aren't going to get onto the drawer, because they have gloves on??!! Of course they wipe all surfaces down with antiseptic, even every nook and cranny behind those drawer pull knobs, between every patient. Right.
Then there was the dental assistant who used her own five-second rule (oops, wrong story) to quickly pick up and start to re-use a tool she had dropped on the floor.
Apply the same mentality to a cell phone, which has much greater mobility in and out of the environment, and it does make an effective germ vector.
Just in case the site gets slashdotted, here's a cut-n-paste of the home page. Whew, glad I was able to get in to get this:
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, mmessier@secureprogramming.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache/1.3.28 Server at www.secureprogramming.com Port 80
What if someone bought the LP, then bought the tape, then bought the CD? They have now paid three times for the same music. Are we buying a license to listen to the music, or not? I've always thought that this situation was somewhat ridiculous and that one should only have to pay once, especially with the prices of CDs as high as they are.
The industry will keep jiggering the protection schemes until it finds something that consumers will accept. My point is, this is technologically achievable. O'Reilly doesn't seem to think so, and holds out the 80's as an example. But the 80's are not an adequate characterization of what is happening today and in the future: networked, secure, and in many cases closed systems that can get fixes via over-the-air updates.
Case in point: my cell phone. Recently an over-the-air update removed several applications from the phone. This same technique can be used to update security mechanisms, even if they are cracked.
The cell carriers make plenty of money selling ring tones. Nobody has cracked the format for ring tones on my cell phone yet. The same model will work for music and other content once devices are more secure.
DRM would never work on today's PCs, though. I think there are many people (in the entertainment industry, for example) who think the PC was a regrettable mistake that should now be fixed by replacing it with a more controlled, less user-programmable, platform. They might not be able to do that at this point, but they will try with other devices. PCs will not go away, but other devices will become more and more central to people's lives. If DRM can be made to succeed on those devices, it will be viable.
Classy way to deal with my typo :-).
>Joe Clueless Consumer does not have to be a crypto expert, just a Web amateur capable o downloading the "codec"
To do that, Joe must have a machine that allows downloading and installation of the codec. Too bad for Joe, his machine will probably have mechanisms to prevent and even retroactively fix security problems.
Close the system, and the game is over. You don't have to close all the systems, just the ones available to consumers. So, there emerges "trusted" computing (that can be trusted by content providers, not by the owner of the device). Don't assume the computer you can buy today is the computer being envisioned for tomorrow.
The need for backwards compatibility (raised by someone else) is a good point, but it goes away if you change the platform, for example from a PC to a generic entertainment or educational device. Think "device", not "PC".
He thinks the experience of software protection in the 1980's shows DRM will fail.
Not so. In the 80's, software publishers were attempting to do DRM on open systems. Not open in the sense of open source, but open in the sense of being hackable.
The work underway now is to make systems closed, so that DRM *will* be technically doable. It doesn't have to resist every attach Bruce Schnier can conceive of. It just has to be good enough to keep consumer behavior in check.
If DRM fails, it will be because of consumer rejection, not for technical reasons.
I am surprised this Ask Slashdot question hasn't (really) been answered after this many hours. Well here is the answer.
p
Go to this link:
http://www.archive.org/web/researcher/proposal.ph
Create an account, log in, write a proposal, submit it, then wait.
Yes they have Usenet data, not just web data.
After I submitted a proposal this way, I had to bug them by email and eventually phone even to get the account set up. It's not that they aren't helpful, they are just busy with lots of projects.
But don't expect hand holding. You need to be comfortable operating in a Unix environment. And I don't know if the data can leave their servers; you might need to do all your processing using their machines.
By the way, in my previous reply to your post, yes I did see the humor, but there is also an underlying issue for which I wanted to give a serious reply.
You are asking, is it such a bad thing that AOL users are prevented from using a site?
In a word, yes.
The Internet reaches its highest potential when all users, even those that others might consider somehow lower caste, are able freely to read and contribute.
In some places, only AOL provides reasonable access to the net. And some people have to live with that. And some of those people, someday, maybe even today, will have great contributions. But perhaps even greater is the gestalt of full participation, and the value that provides to the entire Internet.
Problem is, the people who can afford the device and the service, are already old enough to feel stupid playing a video game on a tiny screen out in the open somewhere.
Don't know if this advice applies to this guy or not, because he might truly have a need to run at exactly midnight. But please, run your cron jobs at randomly chosen times, instead of exactly on the hour. That way we can spread the load (machine and network) better. Thank you, have a nice day.
OK, then, private voicemailbox; volunteers have access to listen to messages; normal cell phone; done.
I think you should find out whether this assistant actually has a clue what a weblog is, and report back to us. Does he/she imagine that there are people who actually will want to listen to this stuff? Or is there another agenda -- maybe the assistant wants to take voice notes for the purpose of later writing a book? If that is the case, just use a private voicemail box with a large storage allocation.
Another way would be an audio recorder (Archos) or even a small tape recorder, a line in jack on a sound card, and a few perl scripts to upload the newest recordings to a web site. Almost any geek should be able to slap this together.
An audio blog does have the cool factor of being a new thing, but the problem is listening to audio is so linear, it consumes human time to a much greater degree than text. There are no shortcuts with audio (short of tricks that are unlikely to materialize just yet in your particular weblog). I would have the same problem with a video weblog.
Do you have any attorneys in the Department focusing on user rights, as opposed to property owner rights? (When I think about IPR issues, I think not only of ownership Rights, but also of the Right of Fair Use.)
In other words, will the DOJ step in to enforce the Right of Fair Use if it is being infringed? If this seems too hypothetical, has there every been any such enforcement, and if not, why not?
Thank you for answering questions in this forum.
What, me, joe random slashdotter, feel shot down? Naaah. Thanks for the informative post.
Some issues I haven't seen mentioned:
1) In zero-g, will lubricants (minimal as they are) be more prone to leak out?
2) In zero-g, will friction be slightly lower, and will this cause any problems? Does modulation of RPMs depend in any way on any component of friction that is influenced by gravity? How about head movement?
3) Is head movement and position affected by gravity? I'm guessing not, but then, I'm just joe random slashdotter.
4) Will vibration issues be introduced by the removal of the (possibly dampening) force of gravity? Note I am not talking about external vibrations here, I'm talking about vibrations of the hard drive itself.
Let's see, you have been entrusted with finding RAID storage that is going to be floating around in space, or perhaps mounted in diving or falling airborne devices, and you are unfamiliar (scary in itself) with what's out there, and with this kind of risky work you are reaching out for help from... Slashdot?
Let me just say, YIKES!